A game without well-crafted Game Pillars has weak foundations.

The Game Direction is too loose, decision-making is held randomly, and your game is always on the verge of wrecking. Building proper Game Pillars will make you define hard constraints to your Player Experience. They clarify your design goal, focus team’s decisions during development, and make your game more coherent and consistent.

This week, I’ll show you what good Game Pillars look like with some concrete examples.

Good Game Pillars make up half of a good Game Direction.

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We’re going to discover:

• What Good Game Pillars Looks Like
• Real-World Game Pillars Example And Analysis

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Good Game Pillars Looks Like

Game Pillars describe the Emotions and Sensations aspect of the Target Game Experience.

Emotions and Sensations, despite not being the goal of the game, are 2 crucial components of the Player Experience. Game Pillars are the concrete manifestation of them in the Game Direction. They describe the Target Game Experience by limiting how far it can stretch. If you don’t know the difference between Player Experience and Target Game Experience, this blog post will end the pain.

It seems easy to come up with Game Pillars, but it’s not.

So, I’ll take a “reverse approach” by giving you some simple guidelines to check a properly made Pillar.

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Not all Game Pillars are equally good.

As we’ve said in the Game Direction episode, you want to describe the experience the game generates, not the game itself. So, what does a good Game Pillar look like?

A good Game Pillar has 3 characteristics:

• It’s specific
• It’s not about the game’s content
• It describes emotions and sensations

If your Game Pillars don’t respect even just 1 of these, you can improve it.

Anytime, during the Concept Phase, you come up with a potential Game Pillar, make sure to check it against these 3 characteristics.

Remember that a Game Pillar could be a single word or an entire sentence. The important thing is to make them as clear and descriptive as possible about the experiential factor you want to communicate.

Let’s now see some counterexamples to better clarify the concept.

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Game Pillars are often mistaken or misunderstood.

They're probably the most underexplained Game Design concept, yet one of the most crucial, especially at the start of a game project. You can find mistakes from beginners (who often ignore them) and veterans (who often make them vague or too tight).

Here are some examples of wrong Game Pillars (made up and attributed to no one):

• Exciting Combat: It's specific but poorly describes an emotion or sensation and is content-based.
• Smooth Animations: It's specific, but it's content and doesn't describe emotions or sensations.
• Friendships: It describes emotions, and it's not content, but it's pretty broad.

These examples should give you a solid mental model of Game Pillars.

Let's now look at some well-made Game Pillars and try to understand why.

Real-World Game Pillars Example And Analysis

As far as presenting Pillars, the possibilities are endless.

The guidelines I gave you to build them are specific and valid for any game, but how you structure and present them can vary. You need to adapt them to your team organization and how members communicate.

There’s no one-size-fits-all kind of structure because every team is different. Also, remember that building the Game Direction is an iterative process, so the “perfect structure” for your team will come up over time during the Concept Phase. So don’t get bogged down in choosing the structure before even building the Pillars themselves; it’s a useless waste of time.

Let’s now dive into the first example: God of War (2018) Pillars.

God of War (2018) Pillars are generally a good example, but…

They’re not perfect; let’s analyze some of them.

• “High Optical Mocap Fidelity”: It’s content and shouldn’t be here. If you want high-end graphics, it’s better to state the feeling you want to generate with it.
• “Son is Believable”: First, “Believable” is a too generic and arbitrary term. Second, “Son” could be seen as content, so it should not be included.
• “Humanized Kratos”: It’s a good Pillar since the term “Humanized” before a God evokes a sensation of weakness of a generally powerful entity. “Kratos” is much like “Son”; however, it could be accepted here since we’re in the God of War franchise. Nonetheless, it would be better without it since what’s important here is not the character but that he’s a God.

We could analyze more of them through this lens, but these are the most interesting ones.

Also, it’s good to point out that, in my opinion, God of War Pillars are a lot and probably even too much. I get it’s a huge game, but the more Game Pillars you have, the more you tend to add content and increase their management difficulty.

It would be better to have a range of 3-5 Game Pillars for most games.

Okay, let’s move to the next example: Subnautica Pillars.

Subnautica Pillars are one of the best examples of Game Pillars out there.

I've never seen such a beautiful example of perfectly crafted Game Pillars. In this instance, developers of Unknown Worlds Entertainment framed every Pillar with a clear and exciting concept.

That's a great choice to create an easy reference for all team members during development. And, as stated in the relative GDC Talk, they focused on emotions and sensations, not game features. The actual Pillar is the whole sentence, but things like "Intoxicating Creation" or "Cascading Hysteria" make it easier to remember and reference during conversations.

That's crucial because reinforcing Game Pillars during discussions makes them solid in team members' minds and serves as a constant Game Direction alignment check.

Before closing this, I want to make a final important point.

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Beware of judging other’s Game Pillars.

I don’t work at Santa Monica or Unknown Worlds Entertainment, so these are just analyses. I can’t know how team members perceived these Game Pillars. I’m judging them only by what’s written. Always remember that Game Pillars are an internal development tool, so the team can influence how they’re presented a lot. Maybe my interpretation of these examples was wrong because the team internally knows something I don’t know.

Evaluating other’s Game Pillars is always a delicate matter that can’t ignore missing pieces and misinterpretation. So, you should focus on judging your Pillars using the guidelines above rather than looking too much at others.

Set your own Game Pillars to turn a daunting breadth into an achievable depth.

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Key Takeaways:

• Game Pillars describe the Emotions and Sensations aspect of the Target Game Experience.
• Good Game Pillars always have 3 characteristics.
• As far as presenting Pillars, the possibilities are endless, and the team plays a huge role.